Speech was the downfall of Bloch in Goalie: “It seemed uncanny to him how someone could begin to speak and at the same time know how the sentence would end.” And everything that Bloch says seems to be misunderstood. First, he has made his peace with language through writing, not speech. Every word, not spoken but written, that led to others, filled his lungs with air and renewed his tie with the world. So I went to my bookshelf and scanned the titles of the dozen or so books by Handke and finally pulled down The Afternoon of a Writer (1989), a brief novel about a nameless writer who lives with a nameless cat in a nameless city, which opens like this:Įver since the time when he lived for almost a year with the thought that he had lost contact with language, every sentence he managed to write, and which in addition left him feeling that it might be possible to go on, had been an event. Gabriel Josipovici suggests that “to destroy language is to give oneself up to silence, another form of death.” But clearly Bloch carries on for the rest of the novel and Handke writes more books. Handke’s critique of language seems so utterly final that I started wondering how he resolved this issue. At one point, Bloch, the narrator, has become so estranged from language that he begins to think in pictures. I’m still thinking about Peter Handke’s novel The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, which I wrote about recently.
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